Getting the Hang of It!

We are now in full swing at Pirate Pete Preschool and the preschoolers are really getting the hang of things! This month is all about using our imaginations and the art of pretending so we looked for treasure from Jake and the Neverland Pirates then counted the pieces of gold we found to see which team found the most treasure and which found the least. This leads to your first 'homework' assignment of the year.  Terms like 'most' and 'least' are ones to work on because these concepts are not automatic in people, they take time to learn and our children are learning these now. Therefore, at dinner, you can ask, "who has the most broccoli? Who has the least broccoli?" and enjoy discussing these terms as a family to practice these skills with your preschooler.

Winnie the Pooh was in on our activities this week too! The preschoolers found out Winnie had some accidents. He had boo-boos on his body in the shape of letters and the children needed to help him feel better. 

Each child was able to open up Band-Aids and put them on 'Winnie the Pooh's boo-boos', and in doing so we talked about the letters on Pooh's body that showed injury in order to build letter recognition skills.  Then the children drew the letter in question on top of the Band-Aid in order to practice drawing them. 

Many of our preschoolers are not familiar with each letter of the alphabet, but only know letters A, B, and C. 

While we do one letter a day as the "letter of the day" we also want to work on continuing letter recognition of all letters throughout the day. 

This activity was terrific in getting the children talking about the different letters they saw on Winnie the Pooh so we used a few other letter matching techniques with the kids by matching upper and lower case letters.  

We will be doing a lot of this this first semester since many of our preschoolers are not yet able to identify letters whether they be upper or lower case.  Differentiation takes place when some students work with teachers to merely identify a letter by name at all and older preschoolers are looking for upper and lower case matches as well as figuring out the differences between b, d, p and q (the tricky ones). 

The children worked on matching letters and characters by sounding out the names of the characters then looking for the sounds in the words on the pages.  Again, our younger preschoolers are just practicing sounds at this point but the older children are putting those sounds together to begin making words.

Minnie Mouse needed our help this week as well when she arrived in our preschool without polka-dots on her dress. The preschoolers were sent to the tables to find a polka-dot with a number on it and were asked to trace that number. After practicing how to write the number, they brought it up to Minnie's dress and matched the number on their polka-dot to the number on her dress and were able to attach it to her dress to complete Minnie's classic look.

As stated before Jake and the Neverland Pirates arrived to preschool a few times this week and hidden treasure not only in our hallways but also in our sand. The preschoolers enjoyed searching through the sand to find various sequins, glitter, shells, beads, etc. to bring home and share. 

After finding treasure, the children matched coins to the appropriate treasure chest to make sure all Jake's 'gold doubloons' found the right place to stay.


Then, Tinker Bell magic happened.  Any preschool teacher knows the importance of Tinker Bell and her motto of faith, trust and pixie dust so we mixed up her magic in our jars and added the secret ingredient (glow stick liquid) and trusted if we added the pixie dust (glitter) and held faith it would glow if we shook it and then watched the magic appear!

 After all that magic, a preschooler's work is still not done; so while teachers are setting and cleaning up activities in the preschool, the children are allowed to engage in "free play".  During this time the children are encouraged to make friends, share, and build vocabulary skills as we talk about trains moving up and over the tracks, forward and backward, towers growing higher and higher, etc.  The important piece to understand is this is their choice. 

Learning how to "play" is a skill necessary for human development. It promotes imagination and creativity as well as encourages cooperation and social skills. This time during our day is just as important as any other curricular time.

However, when we sing the 'Clean Up Song' to start our activities, the children are able to move back into the structure of things like the rhythm sticks.  We had these out this week a few times, to practice patterns and keeping with the beat of some of Olaf's tunes from Frozen.  This type of musical engagement supports mathematical skills and counting as we tap them to the beat. 

We also used the sticks to make it rain in our preschool, supporting our Imagination theme of the week. 

The children now understand the safety concepts of hitting 'sticks to sticks' and 'sticks to floor' as opposed to 'sticks to people.' We practiced rubbing them together to make the wind blow the rain storm in to town then tapping them slowly at first then soon faster and faster until we were hitting them on the floor making the thunder! This is something we do throughout the semester and by the end of the year it will sound like it really is raining!

When we talked about the Disney movie Planes this week we decided to incorporate some science and build paper air planes and test them in the hallway to see which one went the farthest.  The kids loved trying to throw them again and again to see if the same colored plane would win each time or if it would crash right away.

We later moved on to 'Find' Nemo's friends and make some fish bowls out of paper plates, sand, shells and other small sea creature cut outs.  The teachers are placing plastic wrap over them next week to send home soon.  Ideas like this are all over Pinterest and the teachers love finding projects they can do with household items.  This way, if your child enjoys it, they can do it again at home.

Another friend of Nemo's from the sea was the octopus.  This can be done with paint but we wanted to be able to send it home the same day so we chose to use ink pads instead.  The trick is to overlap the fingers to make sure there are eight legs, a fun way to practice counting to eight as well.

We enjoyed making fish out of pipe cleaners and beads as well.  The children practiced their pincer grasp by adding pony beads to pipe cleaners and with a few twists and turns, the teachers shaped them into fish to bring home!

We held story time this week with a special treat using Disney Storyteller as the preschoolers saw the book about Mike from Monster's Inc. over the large screen.  We learned about taking time for fun so we can stay healthy and happy.

One Disney character with a lot of imagination was Dumbo.

The preschoolers talked about where Dumbo worked and as we came upon the topic of the circus we talked about fun treats people eat there.  We then took out empty baskets and asked the preschoolers to sort but not eat the popcorn, candy peanuts and animal crackers.  The children sorted them then talked about what treat they had the most and least of at their table.

More large motor time was spent out in the hallway playing circus games after we talked about Dumbo.  The children enjoyed playing Bozo Buckets by tossing bean bags into buckets arranged in a row on the floor.  This promotes coordination and is easy to practice at home with a laundry basket or two and some rolled up socks!

Counting and playing games weren't the only things we did this week in honor of Dumbo.  We talked about clowns and the job they have to make people smile.  Then, the children went to the tables to decorate a 'clown' mask any way they wished.  This was an assignment to focus on process not product.  

If you questioned why your child brought home a plate with scribbles on it, that's because this was all your child wanted to do on the plate (and that's ok.)  Sometimes with art we are looking for a specific product (like the fish tanks shown earlier) and other times we are focusing on the process (moving crayons on a page to create designs).  Some children are still learning how to correctly hold a crayon and are therefore not capable of creating specific images while other children can hold the crayon and create images from their mind and translate them to the paper with other people actually understanding that image.  
In the case of this clown assignment, the children had the freedom for whatever, then we brought our clown 'masks' to the circle to sing, "Put on a Happy Face."  Each time the children heard this line in the song, they held up their plate to practice following directions.

Whew!  What a week!

What's Coming Up?

Homecoming week will be coming soon at Palatine High School and each year we dress up with the rest of the school.  Look for the information in our blog next week.

This coming week will be our last week for Imagination.  We will be moving on to talk about Fall and other seasons as well as the weather that comes with the changing season and of course, Halloween.  As always, check our calendar for days off and fun things going on at PHS.